


Nameless

by sevenofspade



Category: Ancient History RPF
Genre: Gen, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-23
Updated: 2014-02-23
Packaged: 2018-01-13 13:41:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1228501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevenofspade/pseuds/sevenofspade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everybody is born with a name on their wrist. It's just that nobody knows what the names are for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nameless

Scipio never learned to read the name on his wrist.

That was okay. Not many people ever did and at least he could be sure it was a name, one with letters.

He'd asked his father, once, when he was very young and didn't know any better. His father had pulled back his leather cuff just enough to show Scipio intricate designs, three of them, all fitted invisible squares.

"Somewhere out there," his father had said, "that's someone's name."

"But how do you know? It's just pictures," Scipio had said. They were pretty pictures.

His father had closed his eyes briefly. "It is always a name. Your mother has a Roman one." He'd caught Scipio by the back of his tunic before he could run off to ask her about it. "You can't ask people to show you their name. It's very rude. Besides, what if it was your name?"

That had stopped Scipio short. Nobody knew what the names were for. It could be (the person who was destined to kill you) your greatest enemy, the love of your life or both or something else entirely. In Rome, they'd decided not to care, to cover it up and never bring it up, to confuse the issue by giving the same names to more than one person, to never look for whoever it was that had their name on your wrist.

Scipio knows it's not like this everywhere and sometimes he wonders if whoever it is that has his name on their wrist is looking for him. Other times he just wonders what the name is.

Mostly he just forgets about it.

*

When he was eight, Hannibal’s father took him to the temple of Baal, made him swear to never be a friend to Rome and burned off the name on the inside of his wrist.

Hannibal doesn't remember what the name was. It had three parts and wasn't written in Phoenician or Greek. For his father to burn it off, it must have been Roman. Nobody knows what the names are for, but a Roman name would have been bad luck.

In many ways, Hannibal is glad Hamilcar did what he did. He has bigger things to worry about, he hated having to cover it all the time and it stops people from asking.

He is not glad that he has to lie about how the scar came to be. His father was a good man.

These days, when people ask, he tells them he doesn't remember and looks them in the eyes so he can see which ones think he's lying. Nobody asks anymore.

Nobody's asked since before he crossed the Alps.

Now that Cannae has come and gone, he knows that whoever it was the name belonged to must hate him or be dead already.

He feels sad, a little, that he'll never know if their names matched. He's always wondered about that and he's the only person he knows who had the faintest idea where his name lived and had a chance of meeting them.

He supposes he'll just have to not care about his name, not even a little, and forget about it.

And forget about it he does, until five weeks after Zama.

He is changing the bandages on the gash over his forearm, when he notices red on his wrist, like fresh blood. He turns his arm around, expecting there to be a cut, but no. Tucked neatly next to his scar, is a Roman name or part of one.

It reads 'Africanus'.

*

Years later, in Ephesus, Scipio learns what the name on his wrist reads and Hannibal learns that names do match.

Neither of them learns what the names are for. Neither of them cares.


End file.
